With the rapid development of radio communications technologies and relevant services, people have a higher demand for reliable and continuous high speed wireless broadband services. Based on the existing estimation, in the future ten years, people's demand for wireless capacity might increase by tens or even hundreds of times as compared to nowadays.
To meet such a challenge, a series of new architectures are put forward, aiming to significantly increase the capacity and coverage of wireless networks. Currently, the most widely used technologies, such as the heterogeneous network, distributed antenna system, and high order cell split, have significantly increased the capacity and coverage of the wireless networks.
In the heterogeneous network technology, several small cells are deployed within the coverage area of a macrocell to increase the capacity and coverage of a wireless network. In the high order cell split technology, an antenna of an original cell is split to enhance coverage and capacity. The distributed antenna system technology is a network formed of a plurality of antennas used for providing indoor wireless coverage and distributed within a building, and sub-antenna units need to be deployed at remote ends of a central station and are connected through optical fibers.
However, in both the heterogeneous network technology and the distributed antenna system technology in the prior art, the location of a small cell or a sub-antenna unit needs to be selected during planning, which makes engineering implementation troublesome. Also, optical fiber connection between a small cell and a macrocell is required on a large scale, and optical fiber connection between a central station and each sub-antenna unit is also required on a large scale, which results in a high engineering cost.
In the high order cell split technology in the prior art, because the increase of capacity depends on the number of cells that can be split, theoretically the capacity is higher when more cells can be split; however, cell split brings interference between split cells, which prevents a significant increase of the capacity of a wireless network.